


A Cold Memory Of You That's Beginning To Freeze Over

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 02:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14463258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: He’s never quite put it into words before, even for himself.





	A Cold Memory Of You That's Beginning To Freeze Over

_Where is my brother!_ she screams, clawing and rending at his chest; and he lets her, he holds her shoulders but he stands tall and lets her little fists strike him again and again and again.

 _Where is my brother_ , she sobs, her tears mingling with the spit from her open mouth. It’s a sound Steve won’t forget soon.

 _He’s gone_.

_Where is he--_

_He’s gone. He’s gone._

And Steve’s bruised heart, inside his battered chest, in a broken body that was never meant to be his, finally falters. _He’s gone,_  he says, barely more than a whisper, and he kneels on the ashen floor and brings her down with him and holds her sobbing body in his arms, and Steve Rogers cries.

*

He used to have waking nightmares. He didn’t dream anymore - a side-effect of the serum - but he lapsed often into over-thought, and saw Bucky falling, surreal, as if through the solid floor he was standing on.

Steve got good at shrugging things off. _Just fine_ , he’d say, if anyone asked how he was holding up.

When he closes his eyes now, he sees Bucky suspended in the air. Tumbling but not falling. Reaching up to him, just out of his grasp. And then, with a quiet whisper, dissolving, quite gently, into the cold alpine winds.

*

 _Did you see him go?_ Shuri asks. She doesn’t ask, _did you see him die._

Steve can only shake his head.

_I was with--Bucky was flanking me._

There is an awful, awful silence.

 _Where is Bucky?_ Shuri asks.

*

He finds her in the wreckage of her lab, kicking a broken HUD into the wall. Most of the mess is leftover from the skirmish, and some of it is by her own hand.

 _All this technology,_ she laughs, a cold sound, _and I could do nothing_.

He had said almost the same thing to Agent Carter in a burnt out pub in the middle of a war. Looking at his owns hands. Strong, foreign, full of things he didn’t understand; and still not able to catch Bucky when he fell.

 _None of us could_ , Steve says. He leans down to pick up a few shards of vibranium, dullish blue and once hewn into something useful. Little more than shrapnel now.

 _Why_? Shuri asks.

He knows she’ll ask herself every day for the rest of her life.

*

Steve had carded his fingers through the dust that Bucky Barnes left behind, and it felt like he had forced his hand into a open wound and grabbed a fistful of Bucky’s listless guts.

Some particle of ash might still be under his fingernails.

A bloodstain. Unclean.

*

 _He loved you_ , Shuri tells him.

_We were all each other had, in the end._

_He loved you,_ she says again.

And then she says, very upset, _He was in love with you._

Steve feels a cruel tension fill his whole body. A blind sort of anger.

_Then why didn’t he goddamn tell me?_

*

He's a hypocrite, of course. He was just as silent.

*

Steve wonders if perhaps it’s better to lose the people you love in one go, all at once, rather than have that grief stretched out over a century. To lose your head in one clean slice or be killed slowly, a thousand agonising cuts.

He feels so selfish he could spit.

*

She is Queen now, and has councils to attend, half a city to rebuild, a people with which to mourn. He too has expectations on his shoulder: part of a wounded task-force that must nevertheless get to its feet and stand.

They make time for each other. They are kindred, somehow, in a way Steve would never wish on anyone.

 _I watched my brother die once before,_ she tells him, almost talking to herself. _I thought it would be so long before it happened again._

Steve can only nod, her sentiment too familiar.

_Bucky told me you--_

Watched him die, too.

_Yeah. I didn’t--couldn’t reach him in time._

He swallows, so used to holding everything in. It seems pointless now.

_Did he ever tell you if he was mad at me?_

_For what?_

_For--_

He’s never quite put it into words before, even for himself.

_For letting him down._

She looks like she wishes she could give him some catharsis. It’s the youngest he’s seen her look in days.

 _He never mentioned it,_ she says, distant.

*

Steve stands in the spot on the Wakandan border where Bucky died, and sinks onto his knees, and puts his forehead on the dusty earth, and curls his hands into fists so strained he feels his knuckle bones might burst through his skin.

It’s far from the only pile of ash in the forest.

But it’s the only one he weeps at.

*

It’s Ross - not Hill, not Fury - who calls him in. They’re dead, Steve realises absently.

 _Who’s on your team?_ Ross asks him, clipped, and he means, who is left alive.

 _Romanoff,_ Steve reels off. _Banner, Rhodes._ Thor too, but he had gone in an instant. Earth was only one of nine realms, and he was a King.

His list ends abruptly.

 _Barnes?_ Ross asks carelessly.

_No._

Ross hums, a neutral sound that riles Steve more than he cares to admit.

He’s struck by a sudden thought. _\--What of Stark?_

 _MIA,_ Ross barks, short. _Get everyone’s ass in gear. Get to Washington. We’ll brief you._

He signs off, and Steve doesn’t think anyone’s decided what that brief should be yet. What’s the plan of action when half the world is gone?

*

 _Don’t leave,_ Shuri says, surprising him. _I’ll miss having a broken white boy around_.

It’s a joke, and one he’s unbearably glad to hear, even if her heart’s not fully in it.

_I gotta go._

_I know._

She grabs his wrist. _He told me--_

They both breathe in, too sharp. Shuri wondering if she should say it, and Steve dreading what he’ll hear.

 _Bucky told me--you’ll think us stupid. He listened to me gossip when my brother was busy, and I always--needled him._ She shrugs, uncomfortable. _He told me he loved you more when you were skinny. That he didn’t--feel like he knew you, like this. So much had happened, to you, and to him--_

 _I understand,_ Steve says, as politely as he can.

_No, he said he--was looking forward to it. To getting to know you at last. To--to falling in love with you again. When he had the chance._

Steve wonders if Bucky ever said such things, or if it’s just what Shuri wants him to hear. That bruised old heart of his thumps, dull and steady and painful.

 _I understand_ , Steve says. He slips his wrist out of her thin grip, and holds his hand out for her to shake. She does, curt, and then crosses her arms over her chest; a personal goodbye.

Last time he left Wakanda, he had entrusted Bucky to her.

This time--

*

He sees Bucky fall. He sees Bucky dissolve into nothing. His open mouth screaming, _where is my brother!_

_Where is--_


End file.
